Is SSD safer than hard drive in terms of data not been stolen?

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With hard drives, even after you delete its content permanently (not just moving it into trash), there is a specific magnetic techinique that can be used to recover data. From the point of view of data being stolen after a hard drive is disposed, deleting is not safe enough, and there is a process called de-gaussing to improve safety.

Is solid state drive safe in this respect? If the content is deleted permanently, is it still possible for someone to recover its data using a special technique?

sawa

Posted 2014-04-22T10:58:10.107

Reputation: 169

SSD is even worst. When data is deleted from a SSD its physical location is not used for awhile. Its possible with the correct knowlege to extract that information while it still exists on those memory cells. At least with mechanical drivers you can write over the existing data with random noise. While SSD do have the ability to be wiped, you have to trust the data is actually wiped, and even if it is until new data is written over the existing data ( again in theory ) could be recovered. – Ramhound – 2014-04-22T11:19:01.700

Answers

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Short answer: YES, recovery is possible.

Long answer: It depends on how you deleted the data.

  • Programs that just overwrite some/all sectors will not delete all data.
  • SSDs usually have a build-in deletion mechanism. If it is implemented properly it will secureley delete the data.
  • The typical attack is to read the memory chips directly (without the SSD firmware). Hereby you can access areas that are no longer used by the SSD but that can still contain data.

This paper gives a good overview about the topic: Reliably Erasing Data From Flash-Based Solid State Drives

masgo

Posted 2014-04-22T10:58:10.107

Reputation: 1 541

If I might add: 1. Zeroing is possible with HDDs as well, it just require you to do it manually with some utility. 2. I once heard that IBM claimed the ability to recover files that have been overwritten 7 times... It might be due to the hardware, but I'd say that the real question is how determined and well-funded is the possible attacker? and how much this data is important to you? – EliadTech – 2014-04-22T11:22:45.467

@EliadTech My question was more of curiosity than practical use. I was interested in seeing if it possible at all to physically reconstruct the data (provided sufficient funding). – sawa – 2014-04-22T11:26:15.313

@sawa - Of course its possible. But the amount of people that has the clean room required to do this and the budget to do it is very small. – Ramhound – 2014-04-22T12:13:26.897

Asked: 2014-04-22T10:58:10.107

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Active: 2014-04-22T11:36:52.467